Rapidly decreasing features sizes and increasing power density in microelectronic devices has necessitated development of novel cooling strategies to achieve very high heat removal rates from these devices. For example, heat removal rates in excess of 200 W/cm2 have been projected for the next generation of personal computing devices. Microchannel heat sinks have the potential to achieve these heat removal rates and therefore have been studied for over two decades as described, for example, by Tuckerman and Pease “High performance heat sinking for VLSI”, IEEE Electron Device Letters, Vol. EDL-2, pp. 126–129, 1981, and by Garimella and Sobhan “Transport in microchannels-A critical review” Annual Review of Heat Transfer, Vol. 14, 2003.
However, conventional microchannel heat sinks experience deterioration in thermal performance along their length as the boundary layers continue to develop and thicken with downstream fluid travel. Moreover, hot spots of elevated temperature can develop at local regions of the heat-generating component, such as a microelectronic chip, and thus at local regions of the microchannels.
There is a need for a microchannel heat sink that provides improved overall heat transfer. There also is a need for a microchannel heat sink that provides localized heat transfer that can be tailored to one or more particular hot spots of a heat-generating component, such as a microelectronic chip.